On a chilly June day, with the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard just over the distant horizon, a low-riding, green-hulled vessel finished hammering a steel column nearly 100 feet into the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
This was the beginning of construction of the first giant wind farm off the United States coast, a project with the scale to make a large contribution to the Northeast power grid.
For some of those looking on from a nearby boat, the driving in of the first piling marked a milestone they had labored to reach for two decades. The $4 billion project, known as Vineyard Wind, is expected to start generating electricity by year’s end.
“This has been really hard,” said Rachel Pachter, the chief development officer of Vineyard Offshore, the American arm of Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, a Danish renewable energy developer that is a co-owner of the wind farm. To bring a big energy project to this point near population centers requires clearing countless regulatory hurdles and heading off potential opposition and litigation.
“You don’t see large infrastructure projects built in New England anymore,” she said, “and certainly not in places where they are highly visible.”
Ms. Pachter has seen the difficulties firsthand. Starting in 2002 as an intern just out of college, she worked for more than a decade on a project off Massachusetts called Cape Wind; it ultimately failed, in part because of intense opposition over the years by people like Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who died in 2009, and the billionaire William Koch. Vineyard Wind, too, has pockets of vociferous opposition. Some people in the fishing industry say turbines will make their job nearly impossible.
Ms. Pachter, though, has helped orchestrate a campaign of community outreach, job creation and funding that has finally led to a point where, in industry parlance, steel is going into the water.
In the coming months, 62 turbines, each up to up to 850 feet high (taller than any building in Boston) with blades about 350 feet long, will be planted on a sweep of seabed 15 miles off Martha’s Vineyard, the island where former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have vacationed.
Cables carrying electricity created by spinning rotors will land on a beach in Barnstable on Cape Cod and then head to consumers in the state. Vineyard Wind says its machines will crank out enough power to light up 400,000 homes.
Wind farms are usually built surprisingly quickly once construction starts. Klaus Moeller, the chief executive of Vineyard Wind, who is Danish, said he expected that Vineyard Wind — “touch wood” — would be completed next summer.
The situation looked quite different in 2019 when the Trump administration scrambled Vineyard Wind’s plans with a halt to further study that lasted two years, putting the proposal in jeopardy. But the Biden administration wants to make offshore wind a big part of the effort to rapidly build up renewable energy and related jobs, and it gave Vineyard Wind a go-ahead in 2021.
Constructing and installing the giant machines at sea is a fairly novel proposition in the United States. There are only a couple of other smaller offshore wind farms in the country. Another, about one-fifth Vineyard Wind’s size, is expected to come online this year off Long Island.
Europe has thousands of offshore turbines, and so much of the expertise and equipment used in Vineyard Wind’s construction, including the specialized vessels used to hammer the turbine towers into the seabed, is from across the Atlantic.
Wind developers also say they are hindered by a century-old law, the Jones Act, which bans the use of American ports to launch foreign construction vessels. To comply, Vineyard Wind plans to land turbine components at a port in New Bedford, Mass., and then ship assembled machines to the site on U.S.-flagged barges — a process that adds cost.
Industry executives and analysts say building this first giant U.S. wind farm should help clear the way for similar schemes.
“If they can pull off this one, it will open doors,” said Dan Reicher, an assistant energy secretary in the Clinton administration and an adviser on a California proposal.
In fact, a series of wind farms are planned that could add up to around 75 times the capacity of Vineyard Wind, according to Wood Mackenzie, a consulting firm. About 80 percent of this acreage is off the East Coast.
To Christian Skakkebaek, a founder of Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, the East Coast “in many ways looks like the North Sea, with a shallow seabed, sandy bottom and high wind speeds.”
Vineyard Wind executives like Ms. Pachter are shifting their attention to other wind projects, including another tract near Vineyard Wind, a second off New York and a third on the…
Read More: A Giant Wind Farm Is Taking Root Off Massachusetts